


i want to know you, i want to show you

by moonbeatblues



Series: i came through the backyard, you let the garden die [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, i think this one will have another chapter i just, oh boy i’m in a mood, the beauyashter(??) is soft in this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-06-24 14:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19725511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: “Beau,” she says, like it’s not the first time she’s seen Yasha in days. Weeks.Like Beau’s the weird one for being surprised.“Sorry, what?” She slots the few books in her hand back onto the cart and unfreezes, or as close as she can come to it.Yasha looks pretty, is all. Tall as she remembered, overalls still tucked into her big waterproof boots from working at Cad’s. Looking almost exasperated, but Beau can never really tell.“Do you have a minute?”She doesn’t, has definitely already spent too much of today looking over Caleb’s shoulder at the microfiche reader. Really needs to finish re-shelving before the school day ends.“Yeah.”





	1. all my life i thought i’d change

**Author's Note:**

> i was destined to expand on this au since i thought of it and i think we all knew that
> 
> misc. info: caduceus has a cranberry bog
> 
> (title’s from sister by angel olsen!! one of. the prettiest songs.)

“It’s— oh, I don’t know.”

For once, for the first time in months, it’s really, truly quiet. Yasha’s stroking one hand slow along Beau’s hip in the dark, mouth open and lovely against her ear, folded against Beau’s side while she’s spread-eagled in the center of her and Jester’s bed, mangling the sheets in her fists and sort of just staring at where the ceiling melts into shadow.

It’s weird, it’s like something broke open in her all at once. Beau wonders if it’s how Molly felt, if maybe he never was joking about charm; he knew what it was like to have Yasha’s trust, poured out dark and sudden and heavy like this. It had taken so long, and then no time at all.

“I like that you don’t know it, you know?”

Beau doesn’t. She curls one fist further in the sheets and turns so she’s looking up at her, chin pressed to Yasha’s collarbone.

“Yeah, but—“

“It means I can teach you, Beau,” and there’s this thread of humor— she’s being laughed at, again, but for once she can’t quite stoke enough anger to keep from fizzling back down into something calm.

Feeling quiet, quieted— it’s what she tries to remember when she thinks about Yasha, this feeling and nothing else.

—

“Beau,” she says, like it’s not the first time she’s seen Yasha in days. Weeks.

Like Beau’s the weird one for being surprised.

“Sorry, what?” She slots the few books in her hand back onto the cart and unfreezes, or as close as she can come to it. 

Yasha looks pretty, is all. Tall as she remembered, overalls still tucked into her big waterproof boots from working at Cad’s. Looking almost exasperated, but Beau can never really tell.

“Do you have a minute?”

She doesn’t, has definitely already spent too much of today looking over Caleb’s shoulder at the microfiche reader. Really needs to finish re-shelving before the school day ends. 

“Yeah.”

—

Yasha leans against the wall of the nearest shelf— Geography: 940-948.9; Western Europe (cont.)—and sucks in a long breath.

“Can I stay with you and Jester for a while?”

Beau blinks.

“What? Oh, sure.”

As if there’s a world in which she’d ever say no, Yasha sags further against the shelf. It’s one of the beige-y metal ones they use in the back, protests a little but doesn’t sway. 

“Thanks.”

Beau doesn’t ask why she’s not staying with Cad again, in the spare room off the greenhouse. Just files it away, quiet.

“Jester’s still visiting with her mom, but she’ll be back in a few days. We can call when we get home, if you want.”

Yasha doesn’t flinch at the word  home , just breathes out heavy again like something stepped off her lungs. 

“Okay.”

Beau leans on the cart until it squeaks, and looks up and down the aisle. 

“I don’t get off for another few hours. I’ll give you the key if you wanna head there now and crash— just leave it unlocked, yeah?”

Yasha nods, and Beau notices her roots are just starting to grow back in that wispy silver-white. More things Jester can fix.

—

“Hey Jes, guess who’s back in town?”

Beau has just the wherewithal to hold the phone away from her ear to avoid the initial brunt of Jester shrieking.

“Oh,  _Beau_ , is she there? How is she? Did you tell her about the tattoo yet? Did you tell her I finished her design?”

Beau looks across the shadowy expanse of the living room to where Yasha’s curled on her side, dead to the world on the couch she’s far too big for. The back of her neck prickles— she knows it’ll mean a lot, knows in the secondhand way where she knows Jester knows how Yasha would feel, but can’t quite wrap her own head around it.

“Not yet.”

—

“Hey.”

Yasha’s voice has this unfair, raspy curl to it. She props herself up on an elbow to watch Beau meting out loose tea into the strainer— Cad’s, of course.

“Hey, sorry for waking you up.”

“No, it’s fine.” Yasha watches her for another few seconds, eyes narrowed with sleep and intent in a way that’s making her jittery from across the room. Heavy. “Can I have some?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She settles uneasily in the armchair they never use, feeling like a gull on a park table. Forever guilty, awaiting an awkward exit. 

They drink in silence for a little while. It’s a little weak, like she always ends up making it. Never patient enough, maybe, or afraid of leaving things be.

“Sorry I didn’t wake you up when I called Jester earlier. She said to tell you she finished your design, it’s down at the parlor.”

“Oh.” Yasha’s eyebrows draw together slow, like they’re pulled by a stitch. “Do you think we could go see it?”

“Uh, yeah. We could go tomorrow, if you want.”

“Do you have a key?”

—

The bell over the door is  loud with the place this quiet, this dark.

Beau hasn’t been around this late since Jester did hers— she never wanted to do theirs on the clock. There was something more private about it— intimate, she’d say, if she were braver— just the low, buzzing light in the back and something spilling thinly out of the radio on the counter, Jester’s hands cold and soft trailing over her shoulders.

It’s empty without her there, like everywhere else, the shell of something brighter, fuller, louder.

She finds it easy enough, though, one of Jester’s sketchbooks flipped open to it right on her desk. Like she knew Yasha would come back.

Beau just watches Yasha inspect it, though, retreating back to the doorway, only the desk lamp for light. There’s a weird sense of holiness to it, seeing Yasha blink and blink down at it, fingers curling into a fist on the wood. Her chest heaves up and empties again, like a fireplace bellows.

And, well, she gets it, always ends up astonished by Jester, too. It’s a very specific impossibility, not to be.

“Beau?” And there’s not really a  need to whisper, but it makes Yasha’s sleep-rough voice even raspier. “Do you want to see?”

“Um—“ She swallows. Clears her swimming brain of context. 

“Sure.”

Beau circles around the desk, feeling like some sort of wary carnivore, a hunter in reverse, to see the thing and immediately sucks in a breath made hissy by her teeth.

She knew they were wings, but the full effect has it so they line up with the shoulder blades, skinny bird-bones stretched almost to the elbow. 

She remembers Jester sketching furiously with two books open on her lap, remembers wondering why she was so interested in bird anatomy all of a sudden when Jester gave them to her to return, feels honey-warm thinking about it.

“Oh.”

Yasha leans a little into her side and says nothing.

“She gave me one, too, you know? I just— I know you knew Molly the best, but I wanted something to remember him by.”

She can feel Yasha’s eyes heavy on her face, pulls her gaze to meet them. “Uh, I can show you, if you want.”

The silence that follows is especially magnetic— Yasha just keeps watching her with that strange heaviness. If it were any brighter she might think Yasha was amused, the corners of her mouth pulled ever so slightly, but it’s dark, and quiet and she just looks for all the world like a big barn owl, face like the moon and tilted down to her.

“Alright.”

—

“You’re very pretty, Beau, you know that?”

Yasha has big hands. Like, she knew that already, but it’s different this way, alright?

“Stealing my lines,” she grits out, turning her face to the side, and Yasha laughs.


	2. still i will live here

They all end up working at the bog before the harvest every year. It’s just what happens.

It’s hot out, full-on dog days, and she can hear Cad’s bees worked up over something back by the main house. Dumbass kids throwing rocks from the woods again, maybe, or recouping after a raid from something in the night. Jester keeps secreting single berries in the front pocket of her overalls, she knows, because her face always wrinkles right after eating one. Like she forgets they’re not really that sweet, every time.

She tugs, delicate as an afterthought, at a vine. The berries are still fine, jewel-red in the sun, but the leaves are stained purple in parts; a dark, graying thing, just like Cad said. 

She wonders just how bad it must be, for not even Caduceus to know what’s going on. They’re the same vines the first Clays coaxed out of the peat, after all; it’s the same sphagnum that’s coated bodies for generations.

It seemed like such a strange business, when they met him, but now there’s something soothing about wading out into the bog, pulling up its fruits in handfuls, finding some relief from the late summer. She’s a little angry, all of a sudden, at the earth for turning on someone so gentle. Why it would come here, of all places, where Cad wanders among his cranberries in the mist of the cooling mornings, a tall, spindly specter draped in pale pink.

“Beauuuuuuu,” Jester whines, “come help,” and she’s pushing her fringe back into her hood, the shape of the whole thing warped by the twin curl of her horns. “The sooner we get done, the sooner we can go back for lunch.” And indeed, Beau can smell Cad’s cooking from up the shallow hill, something mushroomy and fried in that goat butter they’d picked up in Uthodurn.

And Cad needs more help these days since Yasha’s gone, as goes unsaid. It reminded her of home, she’d said, and she was the only other one who’d go out early. Another shape in the fog, mess of hair tied back and that blue-black line disappearing from her lower lip into the throat of the turtleneck she always liked to wear under overalls. One morning Beau had dragged herself out of bed at the asscrack of dawn to help out and ended up just watching Yasha work from the window, like she was some kind of deer in the yard, drinking Cad’s tea and trying to think of a reason she’d stuck around for when Yasha came trudging back up a few hours later.

She didn’t find one. It didn’t matter much— only with Cad and Yasha did Beau ever feel like  _she_ was the one talking too much.

(“Beau,” Yasha says, voice flat, fingers tugging at her hair tie. 

Her skin prickles where, just below Yasha’s hands, Jester’s ink, Molly’s lines are stamped. Thin, sure-traced, loud in every silence, a triangle Yasha always likes to trace with her thumbs. 

“Yeah?”

“You talk too much.”)

She shivers in the heat. 

“Sorry, coming.”

—

“Beauuuu,” Jester says— she always says her name like that,  **_bow_ ** _-wuh_ — “ you have such nice hair, you know.”

“Mm.” She tries for impassive, but it’s honestly hard to string more than one syllable when Jester’s fluffing her hands in her hair like that, acrylics a dull, heavenly scratch against her scalp. Jester’s the first person who’s complimented her like this since— since her mother, maybe, or Tori, but it’s way too early and she’s way too clear-headed to think about that for too long.

Her hands pause. “D’you think— you trim it yourself, right?”

Beau swallows, throat sandpapered over with hurt. “I do now.”

“D’you think you could cut mine like that? Like yours, I mean.”

“Yeah, if you want. You really like it that much, huh?”

Jester’s quiet for a long moment. “It’s really pretty on you, Beau, you know.” And that doesn’t answer the question at all, really, but Jester scratches at her scalp again and her eyes roll a little behind her eyelids.

Her next words are uncharacteristically quiet, and Beau barely catches them over the soft static in her skull. 

“Do you think it’d be pretty on me?”

“Everything’s pretty on you, Jess,” and she’s almost slurring with how floaty everything feels, since Jester just showered and she smells like artificial mango and coconut, a little plasticky but sweet sweet sweet. It’s not any more of a confession than what she’d normally say, but there’s something hand-crafted about this moment, something tinged with a little too much sadness but still paper-tender, like crane wings, ghosting air past when you pull the tail.

“Oh.”

Jester’s head knocks against hers a little harsh when she leans over Beau, horns and all, Beau’s head still tilted back against her thigh. 

“So you’ll do it, then?”

“Fuck yeah. I still owe you, like, eight million times over for the tattoo.” The tattoo, also hidden against Jester’s thigh, and damn if now doesn’t feel a little like then, quiet and syrupy like down at the parlor after hours, Beau’s hand wrapped around her ankle since both of Jester’s hands were busy. She was quiet the whole time, so still except for the first jump of her skin under the needle and the way the hair on her arms stood on end. Just like now she’d been sleepy afterward, and had just passed out there on the bed, head dipping like a swan’s into the little face hollow— sue her, it was a repurposed massage bench and it worked  _fine_ .

“I’d do it even if I didn’t, you know that. Could do it right now, even.”

“Okay,” Jester whispers, and her head feels so heavy, weighed down in a new way now the thought of it all was there. The thought of Beau, and mirroring that pose just so, tilting Jester’s head forward with those callused fingers, the smooth buzz of the razor and hair falling like raven-feather snow to the bathroom tile. 

She cards her fingers in the just-overgrown fluff of Beau’s hair, loose topknot a swirl of brown-black over Jester’s lap, hiding her hands, their ministrations. “In a little while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who started college!! it’s kinda wack but this au still eats at me, so here we are
> 
> (chapter title from i will by mitski)

**Author's Note:**

> as usual, i’m @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello


End file.
